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SUMMARY:

A haunted and newly pardoned Bucky Barnes who’s just barely regaining his footing in a world he no longer recognizes is thrust into a relentless spiral of grief when his next door neighbor’s lullaby unearths what he thought was a forgotten past. As memory and trauma collide, an unfortunate encounter with the world’s most understanding woman offers a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak life. Forced to confront the soft-hearted man he once was and the weapon he was forced to become, Bucky is faced with a choice: surrendering to the familiar comforting pain of isolation, or opening himself up to the terrifying possibility of real, tangible human connection.  

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a/n: wow! finally posting the thing i've been talking about nonstop on twitter for weeks! who would've thought? anyway, here's chapter 1 of my brain-child, i hope you enjoy :D pls lmk your thoughts & i'd love to discuss on twt (linked in my description!) onwards!

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Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool.  I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says Not everything feels like something else. –Angie Sijun Lou

The muffled sounds of shrieking bleed through the thin walls of Bucky’s bedroom, causing something sharp and unnervingly familiar to curl behind his eyelids like smoke, making them snap open harshly. He blinks owlishly at the ceiling for a beat­—trying to discern whether he’s still trapped in a dream, or hovering in the space between wakefulness and something more rotten, more putrid. More hollow.

The first thing he registers as he sits up isn’t his right hand curling around the sheets as they pool around his waist, or his knuckles blanching impossibly with the force of his grip, the seams of the thin blanket groaning in protest under his palm. It isn’t his heart slamming against his ribcage like a jackhammer, too loud, too quick. Like it wants out. It’s not the thin sheen of sweat that coats his upper half like a second skin either. Slick, salty, drying too quickly under the slow rotations of the ceiling fan like it was never even there. 

No, the first thing his sleep-addled mind latches onto is a sound. Something mildly foreign, but not quite. Something raw, earnest, and too human. Something that feels too much like a memory, buried impossibly deep inside his very soul. Inside the marrow of his bones, branded onto the sheath of every single cell inside his body.

Something that feels too much like before.

Before the pardon, before Vienna. Before Hydra and the Chair. Before the train and the fall. Before Bucky knew what gunpowder and death smelled like, even.

His ears zero in on the sound on their own accord with no strain or fanfare. They pick it out from between the noises of the city and the faint rattle of water in the building’s pipes, isolate and amplify it in his skull against his own volition. The sound—the song—worms its way through the soft matter of his brain, carves its way through the ridges, and settles just behind his forehead where his eyebrows instinctively draw together.

Bucky blinks and blinks again as the soft, barely audible lullaby travels through the too-thin walls of his room, and suddenly he isn’t a hundred and seven. He isn’t the White Wolf or the Winter Soldier. He isn’t the Asset, a butcher, a terrorist, or any of the deluge of unkind monikers that have been so graciously bestowed upon him by people he’ll never meet. Except maybe in hell, sixty-some years from now, he reasons offhandedly. On instinct, almost.

Suddenly, James Buchanan Barnes is just shy of seven years old, all wide eyes and wonder, mouth hung agape as he balances precariously on his tip-toes, both his palms braced against the armrest of the couch as he peers down at the bundle of blankets cradled carefully in his mother’s arms. The gentle melody tumbles freely, almost mindlessly, from between Winnifred Barnes’ lips, like a sweet mid-summer breeze kissing the tall grass, and it momentarily syncs with the slow blinks of his newborn baby sister. Bucky’s mouth curves carefully around the syllables of her name like a prayer: Rebecca.

Before he was a man, a Sergeant, a symbol, a hero, and subsequently a villain, Bucky Barnes was a brother.

He abruptly snaps out of his reverie as something awful, harrowing, and unnamed begins coiling tightly around his veins, fitting itself into the minuscule space between fascia and muscle. It starts at the soles of his feet and ends at the top of his scalp, making his skin break out in goosebumps like he’d been doused in ice-cold water. 

Not everything feels like something else. 

His breath stutters uselessly in his chest as his left hand shoots up at breakneck speed to cradle the side of his head like he’d been burned. As if he’d been slammed face-first into a brick wall with the intent to kill—not incapacitate. 

Fear, he decides far too quickly for it to be logical, but any semblance of sense or critical thinking flew out the window the second the chorus of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” began slamming itself incessantly against the sides of his skull, trying to claw its way back out into the stuffy night air through his pores.

No, this is too innately consuming to be classified as fear. Sorrow? Maybe, but not quite. Abject horror? Agony? Anguish? Heartbreak? 

Not everything feels like something else. 

Bucky lets out a choked-off sound, one that scrapes against the back of his throat like glass on gravel as he swings his legs off the edge of the bed. 

His first instinct is to run, to flee, to put as much physical distance between himself and the muted singing as physically possible, but he stays rooted to his spot for reasons unknown to him. He barely manages to brace his hands on his knees before a tremor violently rumbles through his body, and for a moment he feels like a wounded animal. A small thing, weak and scared, caught in a bear trap. Eyes too wide, breathing too shallow, teeth bared in defense, hackles raised: all in anticipation of an incoming blow.

His head whips to the side in the direction of the wall as a different sound pierces the air, the hair on the back of his neck rising as a muscle pulls taut in his shoulder.

A child’s giggle, no more than four or five years old, he’d wager. Pretty neighbor’s niece, his mind supplies instantly. He’s seen the kid around the building, knows that you occasionally babysit her. He’s seen her with her pigtails and small glittery backpack bouncing along with her quick little steps as she animatedly chatters to you, his sweet, smiley neighbor, about whatever it is pre-schoolers talk about these days. Alex, he thinks her name is? He’s not entirely sure. She reminds him of his Rebecca when she was little, though. That he’s sure of. 

A breath—another giggle, now accompanied by your barely-there laugh. A sound he’s grown accustomed to hearing when he’s in rooms with shared walls. It always makes his mind freeze for a second, and tonight is no exception. 

Your laugh, thinner and less cheerful than usual, is one of relief that Alex is no longer screaming her little lungs out at an ungodly hour of the night. He briefly wonders if the child was having a nightmare as well. Bucky can hear that your frayed nerves are audibly appeased, and something deep inside his chest clenches so tightly it’s almost painful.

Grief.

All-encompassing and all-consuming. Horrible in its cruel and unusual nature, yet warm in the way it cradles his very soul. Like it cares, almost. Like it sees him for who he really is, just a man of flesh and blood. Not a machine, a soldier, or a weapon. Just a man, and that’s something the world around him often forgets. Something he forgets as well, sometimes.

Bucky’s chest caves inward as another innocent laugh rings out and the singing resumes, livelier this time around, as if in celebration, and his knees lock up. He tumbles gracelessly off the side of the bed, and falls onto the ground in a heap with a resounding thud. In his nearly empty bedroom, barely any furniture aside from a bed, a bedside table, and a closet serve to dampen the loud knock of his kneecaps hitting the floor.

His left hand splays out against the tile, barely preventing his nose from connecting with the floor, Vibranium gleaming in the pale moonlight that streams in through the open window. Bucky’s right hand clutches uselessly at his chest—right over his heart—and a breath rattles against his ribs as he forcibly expels it. He screws his eyes shut as images of his sister, his baby sister, his Rebecca, flash freely behind his eyelids in a ruthless twist of fate.

Oh God, this is how I die, he thinks for a moment as pure and unbridled panic grabs him by the scruff of the neck and roots around unhurriedly in his chest, stirring up emotions he'd rather get shot at point blank range than experience. 

A memory slithers out from a corner of his mind. A memory he thought he had forgotten, or had maybe been barbarically ripped away from him sometime between 1945 and 1950 when Hydra was still struggling to erase Bucky Barnes from existence. His blunt nails dig into his skin, and he lets his forehead meet the cool floor.

It’s early summer, the weather not yet stifling but warm. Mid-June, maybe? He’s not entirely sure. Bucky’s not sure about much of anything these days. It’s 1937, and Jamie is twenty. Young and soft. Too sweet, too free, not tainted by life’s unbridled wickedness—not yet. A thirteen-year-old Rebecca is slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, their joined laughter echoing through the modest living room. He twirls around, his arm carefully tightening its hold on the back of her thighs so she doesn’t fall off all the while she half-heartedly slams her fists into his back. She hollers at him to put her down, and he blatantly refuses to until she tells him where she hid his smokes. They laugh again, louder. A carefree tilt to it, matching crinkles by their eyes, the same scrunch in the creases of their noses as he finally puts her down and smushes her cheeks together in a way only a brother would.

Bucky’s heart clenches dangerously in his chest, and a sound incredibly unrefined and honest falls from his lips. His eyes crack open as he leans back on his haunches, both his shaking hands pressing against his temples as if the memory physically hurt him. It did, and for the first time since the 40’s, Bucky Barnes prays.

Mother Mary, if you’re listening, please have mercy on my mortal soul.

Bucky knows grief. He’s familiar with it. He’s lived with it—in it—for decades, nearly a century, at this point. He knows the way it crawls under his skin and settles there like he owes it something, a debt he can never repay, born from the gnashing of teeth and endless rivers of blood he’s spilled. 

Grief washes over him in waves when he looks out of the window too long, when he spots a tuft of blond hair out of the corner of his eye in the street. It prods at his mind when Sam catches sight of that haunted look in his eyes he can never mask well enough behind one-liners and dry humor. It strips him back and leaves him bare, soft innards exposed to the harsh nip of the air when his friend looks at him like he wants to say something about the crease between Bucky’s eyebrows, but ends up offering him an easy smile and a clap on the shoulder instead.

It whispers to him at the grocery store, when he mindlessly grips a ripe peach too tightly in his left hand to test its firmness, momentarily forgetting. Bucky gets jolted to reality as the saccharine juices of the fruit slide languidly in between the golden grooves of his fingers, settling there like tar. Like blood. He stands there staring at his hand as the juices rhythmically drip onto the floor in rivulets, and his breath catches in his lungs. Bucky starts wearing leather gloves out after that, regardless of the weather. 

Grief greets him in the elevator of his apartment building, extends its hand and beckons him towards it when he looks at himself a little too hard in the mirror, eyes lingering on his newly cut hair. Memories of a smaller Steve animatedly rambling about the best kind of paper to draw on as he hacks at Bucky’s hair with rusted kitchen scissors flood his mind, and he can almost smell the charcoal that always stained the blond’s fingertips when he looks away, gaze landing on the toes of his boots. He doesn’t take the elevator anymore. Too risky. 

Grief barges into his apartment in the middle of the night just as he wakes up from a nightmare, ruthlessly rips the breath from his lungs, and blames him for the bones that cracked like matchsticks under his grip, their sickening crunch still echoing in his ears. It blurs the line between the past and the present, and makes him feel so incredibly guilty to the point where he ends up crossing multiple names off his list of amends that day. 

Dr. Raynor says that guilt can be useful sometimes. She says that it’s good to feel guilt. That it’s part of what makes us human. What she doesn’t know though, is that it gnaws at his innards like a rabid dog with a taste for blood, making him feel like someone took a knife and started hacking away at his guts just for the hell of it.

The laundry list of things he’s done in his time is always hazy and just out of reach, but not quite. Maybe he’s guilty about the lives he’s taken as the Winter Soldier, or way before that in the War. Maybe Bucky feels guilty about the one life he didn’t take. The one he’s thought about taking day in and day out, ever since that afternoon at the Joint Counter Terrorist Centre in Bucharest when the Soldier was let out of his cage to play by the Baron with the grudge.

What the brunet is sure about despite the seas of uncertainty that he treads, is that he constantly feels like he’s walking on a tightrope. Always balancing dangerously on the edge of something he doesn’t have the stomach to name out loud. Something that’ll most definitely get him institutionalized if he brings it up to his therapist, and Bucky Barnes would rather meet the business end of a bayonet than ever be held against his own will anywhere ever again. So, Bucky does what he does best: represses it and shoves it deep enough in the mess of his mind and hopes that it doesn’t sucker-punch him in the middle of a sunny day. 

Grief latches onto his spirit when he’s sat at a diner and spots a family entering. The sight of a child holding onto their father’s hand hits him like a punch to the gut and reminds him of now obsolete promises he made to himself before the war. Promises that he’d be a better man than his father was if the Lord were kind enough to bless him with a family after his return. Promises that he wouldn’t leave no matter how tough things got; that he’d be in it for the long-haul. 

For a second, Bucky thinks about you. His kind neighbor with the pleasant laugh and that sweet-smelling perfume that always lingers in the hall long after you’re gone. His neighbor, who occasionally leaves baked goods on his doorstep, wrapped carefully in wax paper for no apparent reason, despite never having had an actual fully fledged conversation with him. You were always kind, though. Understanding and polite, never intrusive or too nosy. 

He lets himself picture it then, as he watches the little family over the rim of his coffee cup. A life. A real life with a partner. With you, maybe? A life with regular problems. God, what he wouldn’t give to have to worry about bills and car payments instead of whether or not the courts will wake up one day, decide to rescind his pardon, and throw him in the deepest darkest pits of the Raft to rot for the rest of his miserable life. The thought makes him jolt like he got jabbed in the side with a cattle prod, and he hastily slams a few crumpled bills on the tabletop and bolts out of the diner like he’s on fire.  

Grief holds his hand when he walks past a church and makes him stop dead in his tracks across the street. Bucky stands there, transfixed, just staring at the doors like they hold all the answers to questions he never asks aloud. Questions he doesn’t even think that God himself has answers for. He goes in, sometimes. Sits in the back, head bowed as the scent of burning frankincense and myrrh clogs his brain and transports him back to a time when he truly believed. When the words of the Lord’s Prayer didn’t carry with them the scent of blood and singed flesh. A time when he used to make the sign of the cross without the action feeling disingenuous, without making him feel like he was pretending.

 He remembers bits and pieces from when he used to go to church with his mother, sister, and Steve way back when. Bucky would be dressed in his Sunday best with his hair neatly gelled back, and he’d sit in the pew closest to the doors with Steve, in case the burning incense got too much to handle on the blond’s damaged lungs and he had to go outside. 

Winnifred always used to say that Jamie was the most Christlike person out of anyone she knew because of the care he showed everyone around him, namely the ever sickly Steven Grant Rogers. He’d scoff, bashfully brushing the comment off with reddened cheeks by saying something along the lines of how Christ would personally bar him from the gates of Heaven himself if he knew half the things Bucky’s done. His mother would whack him upside the head in retaliation, tutting and scolding him for his blasphemous speech.

Ironic now, isn’t it? Sweet Jamie's a killer with a ledger that's gushing red.

Bucky knows grief intimately. He knows the intricacies of it; the push and the pull. How it settles deep in his bones and festers like an infected wound that he can’t flush out well enough. He anticipates it, usually. Bucky knows when it’ll saunter into his chest, wrap its slender fingers around his perpetually aching heart, and squeeze just enough to maim, to make him feel it.

Grief sits in his pocket like a stone and in his chest like a knife. Grief always makes him feel whole for a few fleeting moments, then it strips him apart again and leaves him hollow and aching: a victim of his damaged brain that the Super Soldier Serum can't seem to heal. 

Bucky hadn’t anticipated it tonight, though. He couldn’t have. How could he have known that he’d get callously ripped out of what can loosely be described as sleep at four in the morning by the sound of a child crying? How could he have prepared himself for the resulting impossibly tender voice of his bright-eyed neighbor, singing something his mother used to back when he was still wet behind the ears, fully and irrevocably himself?

God in heaven above, the last time he even thought about that song was on the seventh of December, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Rebecca was almost seventeen. She stood in front of her brother with her lips bitten raw, yet too prideful to admit that she was frightened by the prospect of war and what it may bring. A Barnes family trait passed on through generations.

Pride; how fitting. A deadly sin. Maybe I was put on this earth to atone for their transgressions, he ponders. To bleed and scream and crawl on my hands and knees, all because my family had ego issues. He banishes that thought just as quickly as it appears, the bitterness of it jarring him momentarily. God wouldn’t do that, right?

That December night, the two siblings sat side by side on the rickety fire escape of their third floor apartment. Their shoulders pressed together, legs swinging in sync off the edge as Bucky sweetly sang to his sister, just loud enough for her to hear over the faint sounds of the yowling alley cats he swore he didn’t feed. 

He did, and she knew that. Good and kind James Barnes, perpetually tender-hearted when it comes to strays. She never once called him out on it though, too partial to the sight of her brother hunched over, leftovers in his hands, half a dozen mangy cats rubbing against his knees as he talks to them about anything and everything. 

Rebecca joined in on the singing like she always did, nerves soothed considerably as she pressed her shoulder more firmly against his, her mouth curved at the corners in a barely-there smile.

He sent her off to their aunt’s place in Shelbyville the very next day. Argued with his mother about it being “the right thing for Becca, ma!” till they were both blue in the face and exhausted. Winnifred eventually conceded, her refusal no match for her son’s stubborn insistence.

He gets that from her.

Bucky secretly hid two paychecks and a half that he had stowed away from his job at the docks into Rebecca’s luggage just before she left, the money tucked neatly in between the pages of the worn copy of The Hobbit he had gotten sent over from Britain when it first came out. Bucky’s most prized possession, given to his sister to read or just look at when she missed her brother. When she missed Jamie.

She stayed there for four years as the United States joined the war, and Rebecca Pauline Barnes never got the chance to say goodbye to her brother before he got shipped off to Britain on the fifteenth of June, 1943, never to return home again. He never got to say goodbye either.

Shit, is there a word for someone who loses a sibling? Where does all the love go when you love someone who’s gone?

His knees nearly cave under his weight at the thought as he pushes himself to a stand, leaning against the wall for a moment as his heart lurches in his chest, a word that doesn’t exist begging to be freed from the confines of his mind. He blinks a few times and shakes his head, recalibrating, before he takes a few unsteady steps out of his bedroom.

Bucky blindly stumbles towards the kitchen for water, eyes hazy, tongue leaden, and his mouth achingly dry.

He fills a glass with shaking hands and brings it to his lips, choking on the very first sip. The sorrow he’s feeling, so immense, so violent and heartless, grows and weaves around his throat like a vine, blocking his larynx like it has nothing better to do than to taunt him. Like it has nowhere else to go and nobody else to torment. He coughs a few times, teary-eyed and mildly delirious as he drains the rest of the cup in one go.

For a brief instant, he thinks: Hey, maybe I can wash this feeling down. Let my stomach acid deal with it.

Bucky drinks three more glasses of water. Then a fourth, just for good measure.

His entire abdomen seizes in response, bile rising dangerously in his trachea as if his digestive tract is vehemently against the idea of dealing with that beast in particular. Bucky rationally knows that this visceral reaction was because he suddenly flooded his empty stomach with more water than it can handle, but he can’t help but feel betrayed, almost. His own body, his first and final home despite everything, actively working against him in his moment of need.

How appropriate, he deems. Wouldn’t be the first time, surely won’t be the last.

He sets his glass down on the very edge of the counter, unconsciously wishing it would plummet to the ground and shatter into a million pieces, just because he did. It seems only fair. Bucky scoffs as it stays put, nausea singeing something sensitive inside him, almost bringing him back to his knees for the second time that night. His sight drifts to the blinking clock on the microwave when a bird chirps outside. 5:20 AM, it reads.

His left eye twitches, and another bird chirps.

With a heaving sigh and a heavy hand dragged across his face, Bucky trudges back to his bedroom. He flops down unceremoniously onto his barely used bed, the frame creaking in objection under his imposing weight, as if it’s pained. Join the club, he thinks, not even bothering to get under the sheets, the city already rousing for the day.

Bucky never shied away from grief a day in his life and he surely won’t start now. There’s just something about grieving a sibling, though. One that technically grieved him first. Coupled with being so callously thrusted head-first into mourning, nearly a century too late, just because a neighbor he’s been too much of a chickenshit to actually speak to properly sang that godforsaken lullaby?

His blood boils, sorrow giving way to unadulterated, unchecked rage, and he suddenly gets the urge to pin the blame on her—you. To paint you out to be some sort of villain in his mind, vilify and antagonize you to his heart’s content. He wants to walk up to your pretty baby blue door that he’s stared at more times than he can count, and pound his fist against the wood so brutally that it splinters and cracks under the weight of his hand. Bucky wants you—the smiley, ever-polite woman he avoids like the plague because he always ends up sweaty and nervous whenever you interact with him—to open the door, and he wants to scream till his throat is hoarse and his sinuses swell up. He wants to yell and yell and yell till he makes you feel an ounce of what he’s been feeling for the past hour and a half. All this misery, because of you. And you’re blissfully unaware. 

But he can’t do that. Not because of the rules of the pardon or, God forbid, his already unsteady public image. He can’t walk over and lay into you till he’s calmed down, not because of the fact that he’s viewed as a ticking time bomb by everybody on earth with a pulse save for the Wakandans and Sam Wilson. 

No, Bucky can’t take his hurt out on you because of the way you sang.

All soft and tender, like a balm on a wound. Like you meant every syllable and pause in breath. As though “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” was written and composed all those years ago just so this woman, this stranger really, could sing it to a crying child—your niece, your own flesh and blood. Just for you, specifically. So your mouth could curve around the words, and your vocal cords could give way to the fragile swell of the melody, molding around it, making it somehow more hypnotizing. Comparable only to a siren’s call wrapped in blankets and all things kind and delicate. Things he hasn’t really allowed himself to feel fully. Things he barely just lets himself feel when he gorges himself on the pastries you leave him.

He thinks of you then. 

Bucky’s mind immediately supplies him with the image of you he’s had the chance of seeing multiple times, in all your chipper glory, standing with your hands clasped behind your back with that stupid grin on your face as you stare down at a rose bush in the small communal garden behind the building. The sunlight catches your hair, and it makes it glow around your head like a halo. He’s nicknamed you angel in his head since. 

He remembers just this Wednesday when he came back home from lunch with Yori, and he saw you sitting cross-legged on the steps in front of the building, chatting up some random stranger as a cigarette dangled loosely from your fingertips. Bucky thought that you looked so unbelievably engrossed in the conversation, and the sight made something in his chest clench while he parked his bike. 

He was also allegedly very briefly jealous of the cigarette. 

Bucky then thinks of your eyes; always shining, warm, and open when they meet his own. Your gaze, curious—watchful—but never imposing. Like you’re trying to peel back his layers and figure him out during the fleeting yet monumental times your paths cross. He still occasionally responds to your sweet hellos and dazzling smiles with curt nods and strained grimaces before he bolts to his apartment and locks the door, still unused to kindness just for the sake of it, despite being somewhat friends with you. 

After everything Sergeant James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes has been through in his 106 years of life, he’s still unused to nicety and gentleness without the other expecting something in return, usually another piece of his soul.

Bucky feels shame from the fact that he even considered displacing his anger onto you—sunshine personified—pool low in his chest, and he pinches the bridge of his nose, stomach souring.

Jesus Christ, I need to calm down. She’s the nicest woman on earth. 

He read something online a few weeks ago on one of those self-help forums he kept hearing so much about that struck a chord in him. Some random holistic expert whose name he can’t recall at the moment was replying to someone’s question about how to stop feeling angry about where you are right now in life. They said something along the lines of how at the end of the day, you’re always exactly where you’re meant to be. That the life you’re leading is the path you’re supposed—no, destined—to be on. That every individual’s life is curated perfectly by the universe, and altering one’s perspective is the key to attaining inner peace, or some other watered-down and oversimplified version of positive psychology mixed with rose quartz and moon water bullshit people online believe in these days.

If this life was meant for me, then why does it hurt so much?

There’s something inherently comedic in an abysmal way about that, and for a second, Bucky fully and irrevocably understands Sisyphus.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Yeah, right. Poor bastard’s probably always a day away from blowing his brains out. Pushing that dumb boulder up a hill for eternity.

Then, a quiet realization: Huh, that’s kinda familiar.

“One must imagine Bucky Barnes happy,” more like. The notion makes him snort, and a minuscule smile tugs at the corners of his lips.

Sam’s voice rings out clear as day in his head: “If you can’t sleep, might as well just lay down and let your body rest, man.” So there Bucky lies, eyes wide, heart split open and wounded, fingers drumming mindlessly against his sternum for the next two hours.

The shrill beeping of his alarm drags him out of whatever dissociative, semi-fugue state he often finds himself in when the quiet gets too loud, and he hastily slams his hand on the poor clock so hard it shatters meekly. He blinks in surprise as he stares at the splintered pieces of plastic scattered all over his bedside table, mouth opening and closing a few times in quiet astonishment.

Wow, way to steal my thunder. Guess modern appliances really aren’t durable, huh? He reflects as he presses his lips into a thin line. Steve really wasn’t kidding.

His joints make a noise of objection as he pushes himself to a stand, knees cracking loud enough to make him wince instinctively, eyes still steadily locked on the wreckage of the clock. He huffs in annoyance and picks up the fragmented pieces of plastic, dog tags clinking softly against his bare chest as he moves around, the sound drowned out by his quiet grumbling. He stomps into the open-plan kitchen and hastily tosses the remnants of the destroyed clock into the trash can, unwillingly picking up on sounds of shuffling coming from the other side of the front door.

He stops dead in his tracks and tilts his head to the side a fraction, senses on high alert, hands curling into loose fists at his sides. Endless possibilities and probabilities swirl through Bucky’s mind, and he’s suddenly very glad that he has a myriad of weapons squirreled away in every nook and cranny in his apartment.

Have they come for another pound of flesh? 

A switch flips and his body moves on autopilot, shrinking the world to this moment. Deathly silent, Bucky creeps into the living room with his back flush against the far wall after instinctively swiping a knife out of the knife block on the counter to his right, his mind running a mile a minute. 

With the sound of his heartbeat thundering almost deafeningly in the quiet that has settled in the corners of the room like a fog, he holds the shitty chef’s knife he bought on a whim when he visited Home Depot last week up defensively. 

Bucky has his shoulders squared and his back ram-rod straight as he approaches the door, still trapped in a panic-induced haze. In his frenzy, the brunet fails to realize that the sounds he hears from outside are just you shuffling on your feet, trying to come up with a way to just knock and ask for a cup of sugar without freaking out your standoffish next door neighbor. He grabs the doorknob with a shaking hand and holds his breath, pulling the door open with enough strength to make the hinges squeak, knife aimed squarely at your neck. 

You blink, startled by the door suddenly flying open. A nanosecond later, your eyes zero in on the knife with a gasp and you choke out a shocked “Jesus Christ!” as the hand you had poised to knock flies up near your head in a gesture of surrender, eyes locked onto the blade of the knife held an inch away from the delicate skin on the column of your throat. You stumble back a step, house slippers squeaking against the tile as you stare at him, mouth agape. 

Bucky, who’s green in the face and looks like he’s a breath away from throwing up, exhales sharply as he promptly lowers the weapon, his vice-like grip around the hilt going slack, steely blue eyes widening impossibly. His mind catches up to the situation, realizing that it’s just you and not ghosts from his past coming back to haunt him, and dread settles sharply in the pit of his stomach. 

The knife clatters uselessly to the floor, the tip almost nicking the thin skin on the top of his right foot as he takes an instinctive step back, creating more distance between the two of you. Both his hands shoot up to face you as he hastily kicks the knife aside, sending it skidding across the floor away from where he stands in an attempt to seem less threatening despite holding you at knifepoint a mere thirty seconds ago. Bucky stammers out what he can only hope is an explanation as to why he almost cut clean through your jugular at eight A.M. on a Saturday morning in a single, panicked breath.

“Holy shit, I am so sorry. I… I thought— oh Christ, I thought you were someone else.”

A beat passes, stretches on far too long for comfort as his rushed words hang in dead air. You stare at him and he stares back, your arm lowering to hang limply at your side as you swallow thickly. 

With your fingers curling around the bottom edge of the robe you put on before making your way over, you exhale a slow breath, trying to reconcile what the hell just happened with your previous hopes of borrowing some sugar for the cake your niece was hellbent on baking despite the time. 

You swallow once again around the stubborn lump in your throat as you take another half-step back accompanied by a shake of your head, eyes softening considerably once your brain connects the dots. Right. Traumatized war vet, boy next door.  

You know who he is, of course you do. You pieced his identity together pretty quickly the week he moved into the building despite his shorter hair, the sunglasses he always has perched on the bridge of his nose—to hide the eye-bags, you think—and the leather gloves he wore smack dab in the middle of the oppressive summer heat. It only took two stiff, mechanical hello’s on his part and a quick Google search from yours to realize that the Winter Soldier, ex-assassin extraordinaire, honorary Avenger, Howling Commando, and a dozen other titles the internet supplied you with, moved into the empty unit next door. You never brought up the fact that you knew who he was, figured that he’d eventually tell you on his own time if he wanted to. 

“No, it— uh, it’s fine?” You wince instinctively the second the words leave your mouth, your inflection and residual panic making them sound more like a question than anything of substance. Bucky grimaces in return, his hands still held up across from you as he replies in a tone that borders on scolding, his eyebrows knitted together. 

“What do you mean it’s fine? Jesus, angel, are you nuts?”

The nickname he’s called you only twice makes your mind screech to a halt, and something hot and sticky settles between your ribs. 

He’d never been unpleasant to you, not in the ways that mattered, at least. Always quiet, always reserved, always skittish, like an alley cat that had seen better days. He very well may have had an aneurysm the first time you said hello to him the day he moved in, in your humble opinion. 

You had caught him when you got home from dropping Alex back at your sister’s place. There he was in all his six foot tall glory, a microwave stuffed under the crook of his right arm, a large bag of groceries cradled in the other, keys held between his teeth, and a little scowl cemented on his face. You thought he was strikingly handsome the moment you laid your eyes on him, even before finding out who he was. You beamed at him while shouldering the door to your apartment open, rattling off a sweet “Welcome to the building!” with your name and an open invitation to “knock whenever!” tacked onto the end. 

Bucky responded by choking on his own spit and dropping the microwave on his foot. 

You smiled at him, albeit a bit awkwardly, and entered your apartment, leaving him alone in the hallway to pick up what’s left of his dignity and the microwave off the floor. 

You and Bucky ran into each other a handful of times in the week after that. Exchanged greetings and strained smiles—the latter mostly on Bucky’s part.

To ease the weird tension between you both which you attributed to his lack of social skills given his history, you took to leaving a little bit of whatever baked goods Alex roped you into making when she was over on his doorstep. You carefully wrapped them in that fancy wax paper you splurged on just for the hell of it. Maybe because some tiny part of you wanted him to feel important? Probably. Bucky never mentioned the offerings and neither did you, but they’d always be gone when you’d check. 

You made a joke to him in passing once when you got home at the same time. Said something along the lines of how trying to befriend him was like trying to befriend a crow, and that earned you a lopsided smile and a low “guess that means you want shiny things in return, then,” from him. 

The longest sentence he’s ever said to you save for now, and you marked the day on your calendar like it was a national holiday. 

The very next day, you got home from work to find a small, potted thing of daffodils on your doorstep with a note taped to the side that said: “not shiny, my bad.” 

You took the plant inside and spent half an hour researching what daffodils meant before you tucked the handwritten note into the pages of your cookbook.

Hope, new beginnings, and rebirth. 

Daffodils.

A March flower. 

He’s born in March. 

Was that intentional? 

After that, he wasn’t as aloof and icy, but good old Bucky Barnes didn’t turn into a chatterbox either. It took him a scolding from his therapist and two weeks of hearing your laughter bleed through the walls you shared for him to offer you his name. “I’m James,” he said. James, not Bucky. Bucky felt too personal, for some reason, and he’d rather be shot dead in the street than be called Buchanan, so James seemed like a good compromise. 

It wasn’t, in retrospect.

The first time you threw a quick “Hey, James,” over your shoulder while wrangling your unruly niece down the stairs almost sent him into cardiac arrest. 

You blink, snapping out of your daze as you finally register his words. “Well, it’s not fine, per se. You scared the ever-loving shit out of me, but I get it? You weren’t expecting company and I was making a lot of noise out here. Didn’t mean to spook you, I’m sorry.” you shot back quickly, the corners of your lips curving into the little smile you often use to calm down your niece when she’s five seconds away from a total meltdown. 

It works, somehow, and Bucky visibly deflates. His arms drop to his sides as his shoulders sag, and he looks at you with the world’s saddest puppy eyes, and you barely resist the urge to reach out and smooth the crease that formed between his eyebrows with your thumb. 

You stuff your hands into the pockets of your robe as a latch ditch effort in preventing yourself from doing something incredibly stupid. Like touching him. He inhales a slow breath and drags his right hand over his face, silently wondering how on God’s green earth you’re able to be kind and considerate even in this situation. Yup, definitely an angel, he thinks to himself as he meets your eyes again. 

There you are, right in front of him, in your pajamas, robe, and slippers, looking like the softest goddamn thing to ever walk the face of the earth. His mind strays for a second as he lets himself take in your appearance for the first time that morning, and something warm spreads through his body. 

For the first time since the 1940s, James Barnes gets the strange and almost irresistible urge to feel a woman’s skin under his.

He clears his throat after a beat, looking down at his bare chest then back up into your eyes, a tight, awkward smile on his face as he jabs a thumb over his shoulder. 

“Let me just, uh, put a shirt on. And don’t apologize, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the lunatic here.”

You nod in response after you mumble out a barely audible “you’re not a lunatic”, shifting your weight from foot to foot as you stay rooted to your spot, watching his back as he retreats into his apartment. 

Finding yourself unconsciously tracing the way his muscles move and ripple, a sudden overwhelming need to either jump off a cliff or drag a palm flat down the middle of his back just to see if it's as warm as it looks hits you square in the stomach. 

You hold your breath when he suddenly comes to a stop halfway into the doorway of his bedroom, and exhale it slowly when he turns to look at you again. As you quickly try to shove down the mildly inappropriate thoughts you were having, you worry the side of your thumb with your nail, and plaster on your best attempt at an “I-totally-wasn’t-picturing-myself-touching-you-after-you-tried-to-kill-me-with-a-knife” smile. 

Bucky clears his throat and gestures vaguely towards the couch that’s visible from where you stand, sheepishly scratching the back of his head as he speaks, his voice thinner and back to its usual quietness. 

“Uh, come in, please. Sorry, should’a probably invited you in before I turned my back to you.” He knows damn well that if his mother were still alive and found out that he left a lady standing outside without the decency of inviting her in, she’d have his head on a stake before he could even get a word in edge wise. 

He mentally chastises himself as he promptly spins on his heel and enters his bedroom, not even waiting to see if you’d come in or not, the door closing with a soft click behind him.  Jeez, good people skills, Casanova. He rests his forehead on the door and screws his eyes tightly shut for a good few seconds before snatching the soft cotton t-shirt he was wearing last night off the floor and hastily pulling it on. 

His swift retreat into the bedroom coupled with the strained invite sends you reeling for a moment, and you stand frozen in the doorway to his unit, mouth pressed into a thin line as a product of your confusion. You roll the idea of coming in in your head a couple times, running through a quick pros and cons list while you lean back and peer through the slightly ajar door to your place, catching sight of little Alex sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, completely enraptured with the animated animals on the screen. Busy, good. 

Deciding to just bite the metaphorical bullet and enter his space, you call out a quick “I’m at the neighbor's for a second, Lex! Don’t do anything stupid!” to her, which earns you a groan and the world’s most scathing look thrown over her shoulder. You huff and half-heartedly roll your eyes, mumbling something incoherent about kids these days under your breath as you step over the threshold and into Bucky’s apartment.

You stand there for a few seconds, hands fidgeting with your sleeves as you strain your ears in an attempt to figure out if he’s having an anxiety attack in his room or if he’s actually just getting dressed. 

A heavy silence settles in the air and you shrug as you walk towards the couch to sit down, your gaze traveling over his mostly empty living room. Your eyes settle on the sole piece of anything that could be considered memorabilia in the bare apartment, and the notion makes your heart clench painfully behind your ribs, for some reason. 

It’s not like you expected the man who was once the most feared assassin in history to have a knack for interior design, but the lack of decoration or personal touches is a tad upsetting in a weirdly humanistic way. 

There on the little side table to your right, though, rests a book, edges frayed and pages dog-eared. You squint as you read the title, and a barely-there smile threatens to overtake your features. The Hobbit. So he’s a nerd, cute. 

You mindlessly reach out and brush your fingertips over the cover as if touching something of his could somehow make you understand him better, then rip your hand back abruptly like you touched a hot stove when you hear quiet cussing emanate from the closed bedroom.

Bucky Barnes hasn’t had somebody—much less a woman—in his apartment in about three months since maintenance passed by to fix the leaky AC unit in the living room, and he nearly falls flat on his face as he shoves his legs into a pair of sweatpants at the thought, a series of expletives tumbling freely from his lips. 

He scoffs and gives himself a quick pep talk as he tightens the drawstrings, reminding himself that he could charm the habit off of a nun back in the day. Yeah, but I wasn’t a brain-damaged super-soldier back then. Tough luck. 

Just as Bucky’s about to slip into another relentless cycle of endless self-flagellation, your voice, soft, honeyed, and tinged with worry calling out his name sharply snaps him back to reality like he got backhanded across the face. He shakes his head, blinking as he swallows around the ever-present lump in his throat that was exacerbated by hearing you sing that stupid song this morning, and he automatically leaves the room. 

Bucky, unfortunately for all parties involved, always finds himself somehow gravitating towards you like he’s a planet in your orbit despite never allowing himself to get too close, and right now is no exception. 

He comes to a stop a few feet away from the couch where you sit, a wry smile on his face, hands shoved deep into the pockets of the gray sweatpants he tugged on. He clears his throat, words coming out scratchy and garbled despite his attempt at sounding normal, and the tiny Bucky that lives in his head blanches in horror. “Sorry for the wait, couldn't find my shirt.” That’s a lie, the voice in his head whispers. Why are you lying to her? 

You chuckle in response, too caught up in your desperate attempt to not look at how the sweatpants slung low over the curve of his hips perfectly frame his lower half, thus not picking up on his internal battle in the slightest. With a dismissive wave of your hand, you stand up, forcing your eyes to stay trained on his face. Focus, you pervert. You’re here for a different kind of sugar. “It’s alright, don’t worry about it—” You gesticulate behind you towards the general seating area while you keep talking, “comfortable couch.” 

He frowns, eyebrows knitting together in the center of his forehead at your statement. Bucky looks between you and the couch a handful of times as he shifts his weight from foot to foot, his expression a strange mixture of mild disbelief and residual trepidation from your earlier interaction—if accidentally holding the sweetest person in the world at knifepoint could even be considered an interaction. “It’s a shitty couch, angel. Lumpy.”

The nickname slips free once again without much foresight or resistance, like calling you that instead of your name is the most normal thing in the world, and that voice in his head rears its ugly head. You don’t really know this lady, Barnes. Cool it. 

You snort in response, the nickname doing absolutely nothing to quell the heat that’s been steadily rising to your cheeks for the past minute and a half. Your nose scrunches and your eyes narrow into thin slits, a little laugh bubbling up out of your throat and making a home for itself in the cool morning air. “If you think this couch is bad, you should’ve seen the one I had in college. Now that was a lumpy couch.”

A minuscule smile graces his features at the melodic sound of your soft laughter and some of the tension in his jaw eases, his teeth no longer grinding together to the staccato beat of his heart. Bucky exhales a puff of air through his nose, unconsciously inching closer to where you stand as he replies. “Both of the couches can be bad at the same time, y’know. It’s not really a mutually exclusive thing.” 

There it is, his old easy charm and impossibly quick wit making a very sudden and unexpected return the instant he locks eyes with you again. It catches him off guard, and something warm and sticky-sweet settles deep in his chest. 

He inhales slowly as he creeps closer another inch, feeling that unnamed thing ooze in his ribcage and drip down onto his lungs like molten lava, leaving them singed and wanting. 

Wanting. 

He can’t really remember the last time he actually wanted anything. 

Bucky is close enough now that he could reach out and touch you if he wanted to. Close enough to count the beauty marks and details on your face, to map out the slope of your nose with careful eyes, to take inventory of every microscopic shift in your expression. He can smell the slightest whisper of coffee on your breath, the scent soft and warm and almost intoxicating, and he has to bite back a shudder. 

You’re dizzying, and he wants you. 

You arch a playful eyebrow in response, crossing your arms over your chest with a defiant gleam in your eyes as your words come out teasing and not malicious in the slightest despite your faux-offended tone. “Not mutually exclusive, huh? Fine, you got me there, Barnes. Can I tell you why I wanted to knock now, or d’you wanna hold me at gunpoint too before that, maybe?”

His chest feels tight as he listens to you speak, the sound of your voice bouncing off the walls of his embarrassingly bare apartment accompanied by your proximity makes his head spin. God, I could drown in the sound of her voice, he thinks to himself. I’m fucked. 

Bucky lets your words hang in the air for a beat and he just looks at you, really looks at you. He takes in the way the morning sunlight that streams through the living room window catches your eyelashes, making them look like that cotton candy he and Steve used to share at Coney Island in the late 30s. 

His eyes trail over to the way your slightly messy hair lays on your head and he feels the sudden and overwhelming urge to bury his hands in it, to tug it until you gasp into his mouth. 

Bucky shoves that particular thought away harshly and bites the inside of his cheek. Sweet merciful Christ, focus. He takes in the way you stand there, a foot away from him bare-faced in your soft clothes, with what can only be described as a coy smile on your pretty lips, and something about this moment strikes him as painfully, achingly, and irrevocably tender. 

A small, crooked smile tugs at the corners of the brunet’s lips as he shifts his weight, taking his hands out of his pockets and placing them on his hips. 

Bucky arches an eyebrow at you in return, matching your expression to a tee as he tilts his head to the side slightly. “Holding you at gunpoint seems a little excessive, don’t you think? ‘S not even noon yet. Seems more like a post-lunch neighborly activity to me,” he gestures to you with a hand as he lets out a mock long-suffering sigh, his eyes glimmering with a delicate kind of joy he’s no longer used to. The kind that’s fragile and foreign and it makes a tiny part of him want to scream. “But sure, go ahead.”

A slow warmth seeps into your bones at the sight of Bucky seemingly finally at ease in your presence, and it warms you from the inside out, causing a light dusting of pink to make itself known on the tips of your ears. 

The impulse to touch him returns tenfold, and the insane desire to become the reason his shoulders loosen and his eyes shine makes you want to fall to your knees and beg whatever gods are listening to please never let Bucky Barnes experience a negative emotion ever again. 

You know it’s silly, and you know that if anyone were to peer into your head at the moment and thumb through your thoughts, you’d probably get shoved into a straitjacket and shipped off to a psych ward in Antarctica, but you can’t seem to find it in yourself to care. 

You lace your fingers together in front of you, digging your nails into the skin over your knuckles in a pathetic attempt at curbing the affection that blooms freely in your heart. A light laugh leaves you at his ribbing and you roll your eyes exaggeratedly, sighing heavily as you fix him with a brief look that says “eat shit, dude” before you reply through a smile.

“Okay, funny guy, maybe look into doing stand-up comedy if the whole…whatever it is that you do now doesn’t work out.” He snorts in response. “I wanted to see if I could borrow a cup of sugar. Alex—my niece—wants to bake a fuckin’ cake at eight in the goddamn morning ‘cause she had a bad dream last night, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her no. I hadn’t realized that I’d run out of sugar till the eggs were already cracked,” you falter, voice trailing off when he laughs, the sound low and syrupy. 

You mentally catalogue every single detail of him in that moment; head tilted back a fraction, the column of his beautiful throat bared, eyes crinkled at the corners, and you dig the blunt tips of your nails so hard into your skin that you almost draw blood. 

“Can—” a breath, “Can I, uh, borrow some sugar?” Stupid, stupid, stupid. Get it together.

Bucky’s laughter dies down into sporadic chuckles, and he has to physically bite his tongue to keep from telling you that he’d probably jump off the moon if you asked. 

Bucky would probably peel his skin back and crack his ribs open to let you take a catnap on his still-beating heart, if you asked. For a second, he considers saying that he’d let you borrow whatever it is you wanted from him if you kept looking at him like that, but he chokes the words down instead. 

Which is a pathetic response that he most definitely needs to get a hold of and never say out loud to anybody, let alone you. 

He nods, opting to stay silent as he glances between you and the cupboard over the sink where a lone bag of sugar and three loose tea bags live a handful of times before power-walking towards it, socked feet sliding against the floor a touch due to his sudden speed and habit of mopping twice a day. 

As he pulls open the cupboard and grabs the sugar, Bucky comes to the quiet realization that you’re utterly fascinating—an endless well of contradictions. 

Soft in your nature yet loud at the same time. Snarky and whip-smart but still unbelievably polite and charming, somehow. You completely unraveled him earlier this morning with your gentle singing, and you still don’t have the faintest inkling of the effect you’ve had on him over the course of these past few months. Your sentimental tone of voice as you sang to your niece this morning left him broken and praying to a God he barely even believes in anymore, and your normal, mundane, request for some sugar is making his skin prickle.

He should be resentful, but he can’t be because your warm presence and earnest joy throws him so off kilter that he may as well be floating aimlessly through space right now instead of walking back towards you, a bag of sugar clutched in his right hand like a lifeline, and a downright embarrassing grin on his face. 

Bucky Barnes can’t quite bring himself to care about the fact that he probably looks like a fool right now as you take the sugar from him and your fingertips lightly graze his own, making every single molecule in his body freeze. 

His Vibranium arm whirrs, his breath catches in his throat like he got punched square in the gut, and he feels his heart take root in his body. He feels like he just discovered fire, and he wants to live in this feeling forever.

Bucky doesn’t believe in soulmates. The entire concept of having one single person in this whole wide world who belongs to him and him alone for the rest of his days seems preposterous. He thinks that it’s a foolish thought that people think to placate themselves into feeling better about being alone. He thinks that it’s the stuff of fairy tales, stories one would read to a young child to lull them to sleep. 

Bucky thinks that the possibility of something as far-fetched and ridiculous as love being written in the stars is plain and utter bullshit. He thinks that on the off chance that soulmates did in fact exist, that his one is probably long-dead and buried, some woman from the 40s with bouncy curls and red lipstick. Or maybe it’s Steve, who’s also dead and buried. 

James Buchanan Barnes is a man out of time, but for the split second your skin grazes his, a little part of his brain opens up to the possibility that maybe soulmates do exist. 

He sharply clears his throat and steps back once you have the sugar in hand, the loud thrumming of his heartbeat in his ears dampening the sound of your voice as you thank him and promise to drop off a few slices of cake in exchange for his generosity, making him feel like he’s trapped under water. 

Bucky nods dumbly, mumbling out a low, “Uh, sure?” as he walks you to the door, still stuck in what he’s sure is limbo. She’s not your soulmate, idiot, you’re just infatuated. He shakes the thought off and smiles weakly at you.

Before you’re out of his apartment in a flash, he can tell that your mouth is moving, probably thanking him again for the umpteenth time, but he can’t hear a single thing except for the voice in head repeatedly chanting: tell her to stay, tell her to stay. 

You don't stay.

After the door clicks shut and you’re long gone, Bucky stands there for a couple of minutes staring at the knife still on the floor, his mind excruciatingly empty for the first time in his life as he attempts to grapple with the events of this morning. The light reflects off the blade, and he automatically crouches down and picks it up. 

Bucky is suddenly, violently overwhelmed. It’s a ridiculous reaction—he’s a grown man, a trained killer, he absolutely shouldn’t be this thrown off by you, but he is. 

He twirls the knife in his hand as he stands from a crouch, his brain replaying bits and pieces from the entire past half hour like it’s a highlight reel, and the sound of your laugh rings out clear as day in his head. Loud and light, like honey and sunlight streaming through an open window, and his heart does an odd little stutter-step where it beats in his chest. 

He was used to sitting in silence before he moved in here, used to the quiet yet relentless thrum of his disorganized thoughts as ink spills over the pages of Steve’s—his—notebook. He abruptly realizes that solely due to the fact that he’s now your neighbor, he hasn’t really sat in complete silence in about six months, and the idea isn’t as horrifying to him now as it probably would’ve been a year ago. 

Bucky Barnes has never considered himself a romantic by any means. Sure, he was a charmer back in the day, but he never had this much baseless affection of this caliber for anybody back then save for that one girl he knew from school, and the realization makes him nauseous. 

Bucky Barnes is not a romantic, but God, you make him want to be. You make him want to write sonnets and paint and scream and sing. You make him want to rip his own arm off and beat himself to death with it because you’re so honest and open with your gentleness, and he hasn’t got the faintest clue how the world hasn’t crushed your spirit yet. 

Bucky swallows roughly as he walks to the kitchen and shoves the knife back into the block, suddenly feeling too hot, too cold, and too alive. 

Panic wells in his chest again and he hastily walks into his room and digs through his bedside drawer in search of the phone he never uses. 

He calls the only person whose number he has memorized despite not having called it in a long while, and the dial tone and his racing heart synchronizing does absolutely nothing except make him feel like a live wire. Or an exposed nerve. Or an idiot. Yep, definitely an idiot. 

He holds his breath when the call is answered, and breathes out his next words in a tone that's subdued, his voice quiet, like he’s telling the person on the other end of the line a secret.

“Sam, hey, it’s Bucky. Can we meet up?”